The Silent Ones Read online

  24

  Helen leaned forward in her seat, trying to get her armpit in the air conditioning stream. She had started sweating more lately, waves of it attacking her like some foreign invasion. As if being forty-four wasn’t demeaning enough, her body had to start protesting at her driving to work. Whenever she thought about her bastard husband Joel the sweats would come on, flights of anger and scorn rising up in her. Her old university friend Liz counselled her to not be bitter and so she woke every morning saying it to herself like a mantra. But it didn’t work, it did not work. Joel, aged forty-five, her husband of twelve years, had left her for a 25-year-old who ‘really understood him’.

  The queue shunted forward and she saw the press corps and the BBC vans and Sky and all the rest of them. She had known they would be here, of course; Olivia had pulled a pretty spectacular stunt yesterday. This interested her. Why that, why now? She pulled down the visor to check herself in the mirror. One day she’d probably be rumbled as the doctor, a woman no less, who treated Olivia. It could be today and she didn’t want to look anything less than professional.

  She watched a couple of cars do the aggressive leave-the-queue manoeuvre. They were always men, throwing their hunks of metal around self-importantly and holding everyone up, as if they all didn’t have places to go, things they had to do. Any other route was much longer and they already knew that; they just liked to temporarily hog two lanes of traffic. She knew she shouldn’t generalise about the sexes, but as she got older she was thinking more and more that clichés existed because they were true.

  The first man roared away. The next car to come past was Darren’s. He had the window down on an old blue hatchback and his tanned arm on the window ledge, a thin band of hippy string round the tattoos on his wrist. He was a strange one, Darren – bent and haunted, yet surprisingly articulate and with a strength of character. The way he’d handled her in the chaos post-Linda had been masterful, in fact. She wondered idly how long he’d stay here; the cleaning staff were always moving on to other, usually also low-paid jobs. Not long, she reasoned, as he seemed to be shirking his shift on this hot day. Probably getting out of town and going to the beach to get high. She realised she didn’t know what people his age actually did – she’d read somewhere that they no longer drank. Could that be true? That they didn’t get plastered? They had no money, she knew, and according to the press were all living with their parents, wanking to online porn twenty-four hours a day, piercings everywhere. His abs would be rock-hard. A pleasing change from Joel’s middle-aged sag.

  She watched the news crews do their thing. The hang ’em flog ’em brigade would be frothing over this latest development. One of the bodies recovered, one family with closure at last. Oh how she would love to be on a talk show, pitted against Orin Bukowski, and run his arguments into the ground! They would never understand her job and how valuable it was, what amazing results could be achieved. Helen felt her bitterness recede. God she loved her job. It had been the great revelation of her life, that she enjoyed work as much as she did, especially now that Joel had done the dirty and left.

  It was a bloody outrage that he could pull a woman so young, a woman who by rights should be with someone Darren’s age. Women accepted such low standards while subjecting themselves to such high ones. It was always men foghorning their bad breath at you while they pontificated about something every woman in the room already knew.

  Helen was at the gates now and pulled in past the press chaos. Work was her saviour, work was what brought self-respect and economic power. She thought of Becky, her sister, mired in faux complaints about her kids and her husband. Becks needed to get up off the sofa, duck the coffee mornings and get to work.

  Helen was angry, that was why she was sweating, she knew. She’d been angry for days, weeks, maybe even years. Becky was coming on a sympathy visit at the weekend with the girls. They were going to make her feel better by baking cupcakes. Her world had fallen apart and cupcakes were supposed to mend it. Those sickly-sweet portions of goo in paper with horrible icing made her more angry than her husband’s infidelity. It was aiming so low that angered Helen. Why couldn’t her nieces cook paella, won tons, spicy prawns, cheese fucking straws? Jesus, women, she thought, rise up against the tyranny of the candy-coloured cupcake! Joel’s researcher probably liked cupcakes. Then again, considering the size of the knickers she’d found crushed between the mattress and their sleigh bed – which was what had precipitated this crisis – the girl was probably just throwing them back up down the pan, the barely digested contents of her stomach still pink as they splattered the sides of the bowl.

  Helen had been entrusted with important work by the state, and she was doing that work well. Her professional success trumped her tawdry domestic mess. She swung round the car park, trying to find two spaces together so she could pull in easily. She began to sweat again at the thought of all those journalists watching her bad parking. She cranked the gears tensely, the anger swarming in her again. Going into the tight space facing forward had been a mistake, she realised, and her angles were all wrong. Fuck it, she thought, as she gave up trying to straighten the car and climbed out of the passenger seat, she wasn’t going to be hard on herself. No one was perfect. Least of all Joel.

  25

  Sonny breathed in and out again, counting a one-minute in-breath and trying for an out-breath of a minute and a half. He prided himself on being able to sit still for hours, retreat into his own mind, watch the images on the screen flowing by. In another life Sonny felt that he would like to have been a yogi on an Indian hillside, wearing white baggy clothes, the faint thrum of drums in the distance.

  But today Corey was ruining his bliss, insisting on having talk radio on, everyone getting heated about what Olivia had revealed. ‘It’s cause and effect,’ Corey was saying. ‘She killed Linda and then the guilt made her give up one of the girls. Saying that, I’m glad she did that to Linda, the girl’s more important than her.’

  ‘What you saying?’ Sonny countered. ‘You don’t want anyone to die, surely. Duvall only using the girl to get out of solitary for what she did.’

  ‘Well, since no one here telling us a damn thing about what’s happening, we can only speculate.’

  ‘You see that chaos on the front gate this morning? That kind of thing upsets everybody.’

  ‘True dat,’ Corey replied. They paused to watch Dr Vivek Chowdray drive his Volvo through the gates and park. ‘We’re powerless, know what I’m sayin’,’ Corey added.

  ‘Yet we have to see it!’ They had both watched the attack on Linda on the cameras.

  ‘Him, people like the governor, Helen, they all got the inside track. Think of Darren, man, she could have killed him!’

  ‘A terrible thing.’ Sonny shook his head. He was only two years away from retirement and he craved the quiet, regular life.

  ‘We can take some of that power back, you know,’ Corey said. ‘With those.’ He tapped one of the screens in front of them.

  ‘How’s that?’ asked Sonny.

  ‘See Vivek there? We can find out where he lives by his licence plate.’

  ‘Or we could simply go up to him and ask him. Sometimes the old-fashioned ways are the best.’

  Corey tapped the side of his head, as if Sonny were an idiot. ‘Where’s the fun in that? I have a cuz at the DVLA. You just give him the plate, and they can tell you all sorts of things – what other cars are registered at his address, where he lives, how long he’s been there.’

  Sonny was nonplussed. ‘You been drinking the Kool-Aid. Why we need to know that?’

  ‘It’s the information age, yeah? James Bond or the CIA.’

  Sonny gave Corey a long look. ‘Let me repeat. You’re like James Bond?’ Sonny burst out laughing as Corey tried to backtrack. ‘Bwoy, that’s the funniest thing you ever say. James Bond.’

  Corey got indignant. ‘Maybe he’s having an affair. It’s always them quiet ones.’

  ‘Like Darren.’ Sonny thought of his
lanky body and hunched shoulders. ‘He’s nice enough. It’s a tough break when you just trying to earn a crust.’

  Corey didn’t look like he agreed. ‘The man tougher than he look with that hair – don’t be fooled by him. You can scoff, but when I find some juice, you gonna wanna hear it. You gonna pay to hear it!’ Corey stopped talking to watch Helen arrive. ‘Oh man, here we go.’

  They both watched Helen try to drive into the tight space bonnet-first. Her angle was all wrong and she was in danger of clipping the brake light of the car one along. She reversed in a movement that looked angry even from this far away and tried to come in again. She ended up abandoning her car half in the space and clambering out of the passenger side.

  ‘Man, that woman can’t drive for shit,’ Corey said.

  Sonny watched Helen get out of the car, looking harassed, scraping her hair back off her face and dismissively beeping the door locked as she walked away. He wanted to give her some driving tips, explain how you reversed in, lined up rear lights and edges and then it was all smooth and easy, but he worried she would label him sexist and not take his advice in the manner in which he gave it. He couldn’t imagine how she parallel-parked. He hoped she was rich enough to afford a drive outside her house. Then again, with her separation, that was unlikely.

  ‘I can find out about Helen—’

  Sonny threw his hands up. ‘Bwoy, we know she been dumped, don’t need no computer for that!’

  26

  Darren tailed the Fiesta to the first set of lights. He stared in his rear-view mirror, fully expecting a TV van to be following. But it wasn’t. He looked at the Fiesta. This befriender didn’t want to see reporters either. The lights changed and the line of cars began to draw away. At the next junction Darren needed to turn right for Streatham – he had abandoned his parents’ argument to try and see Olivia and should go back to his mum, support her on this difficult day. But the Fiesta carried on straight ahead and Darren followed.

  He turned the radio on and found that dental records had confirmed that the bones on the South Downs were Molly Peters’s. He switched the radio off when Orin Bukowski’s voice came on. His parents didn’t like Orin. He had never been sure why, but the feelings were strong, even after all this time.

  The white Fiesta was still two cars in front, and Darren just kept on following until it reached Clapham Park Road near Clapham Common and pulled round the back of a big corner pub that looked as if it had once been a bank.

  Darren coasted to a halt further along and used his rear-view mirror to see what happened next.

  The man appeared a few minutes later, crossed the street and let himself into a door next to a tired-looking charity shop. Darren got out of the car and approached the door. Just one bell, no name. There were two storeys above the shop, a flat-fronted Victorian building gone to seed, dirty windows that looked like they were never opened, grey nets over the windows. Darren got back in his car and waited five minutes but the man didn’t come back out. He turned into the car park behind the pub and saw the Fiesta in a corner on the loose gravel.

  He pulled up near it, got out and looked around. No one was about this early in the morning, the pub still closed. He peered through the car window. A mess of papers was shoved between the seats, along with a half-eaten Yorkie bar. He took a photo of the licence plate with his phone and walked back to the charity shop.

  He opened the door and a bell dinged. By the counter were two plastic bags of clothing and a young woman. She had jet black hair and was skinny, with tattoos and a pierced nose. The shop smelled of old clothes and mothballs.

  ‘How do I post something next door? There’s no letterbox.’

  ‘The post comes here, the flat is connected to the shop.’

  ‘The guy who lives there, what’s his name?’

  The girl shrugged. An old woman came out of the back of the shop, a pair of patent black shoes in one hand. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I’ve got something for the guy next door.’

  ‘John Sears? We can take it in here. He has a key, the shop and the flat go together.’

  ‘OK great, let me just go and get it from my car.’

  ‘Here, take a leaflet.’ She handed him something in a bright colour that talked about refugees in Bosnia and Kosovo and Darren left, the bell jangling as he went.

  He walked to the Common, his mood dark, and phoned Kamal from a lying-down position on the grass. As the answerphone clicked in he hovered his legs two inches above the grass, so that when he finally got to leave a message about being too ill to come in to work he sounded like he was gasping his last.

  He hadn’t eaten, so he found a small café and ordered a fry-up. The TV news droned on a set in a ceiling corner of the room. He was tucking in to his food when Olivia’s picture filled the screen, the stock image from ten years ago, with the swollen eye and the bad hair. Then the screen filled with pictures of the five victims. They always used Carly’s school photo, her dark hair falling into one eye. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth to Darren now.

  There were shots of the site where Molly had been found. In the glory of a June summer day the South Downs looked so beautiful it made Darren’s scarred heart ache anew. He missed the sea, he missed the countryside, shut up as he was in south London. He had no appetite left; he pushed his plate away.

  The girls and women ranged in age from fourteen to eighteen. They weren’t alike particularly; some were blonde, others brunette, Rajinder’s family were originally from Pakistan. Carly and Isla were friends from Brighton, Molly had lived in Hove, Heather was from Eastbourne and Rajinder was from Burgess Hill. The investigation into their disappearances had been slow to start and there had already been one inquiry into why. No one had realised at first that the disappearance of Heather, the first victim, was suspicious; she was a troubled girl who’d run away multiple times from a children’s home, she’d had problems with drink and drugs and had been arrested for soliciting. The last known sighting of her was on Brighton Pier in 2001. She had been fifteen.

  Rajinder came from a strict Muslim family and had rebelled against her arranged marriage to a cousin from Lahore. When her family reported the bright eighteen-year-old missing in 2002 the police had initially suspected the family, causing uproar in the local community. That Rajinder had fallen into Olivia’s clutches was only discovered when Olivia was arrested and her house searched.

  Fourteen-year-old Molly Peters never came back from a trip to Preston Park in 2002. The lack of urgency in the case was later criticised in an official report, but the investigation had been complicated by Molly’s chaotic life – her mum was a drug user with multiple boyfriends and the family were known to social services. Molly had written a note to say she was running away.

  Carly Evans and Isla Bukowski, fourteen-year-old friends, disappeared on a late-afternoon shopping trip in November 2003. Happy and contented girls from secure families, their disappearance launched one of East Sussex’s largest police investigations.

  Slowly, meticulously, the police investigated every avenue. It wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough that solved the case, it was dogged, methodical police work where every little bit of information built on previous information to complete a solid picture. Finally Olivia cracked under the weight of the evidence put before her.

  The police had a problem gaining much information from the runaways and drug addicts who had been Heather’s friends. They all distrusted the police and were reluctant to get involved. One girl, ranting in the back of a police car, said that the only person who had been nice to Heather had been her social worker – she’d hung out at her house sometimes. This titbit of information led the police to pay their first visit to Olivia, hoping she may be able to shed some light on her disappearance. Olivia didn’t reveal much but did give them some dates. Shortly afterwards, it was discovered that Olivia Duvall had for a few weeks been assigned as caseworker to Molly Peters. This time two senior police officers paid Olivia a visit and looked round the house; they note
d the heavy lock on the door to the basement and the rings set in the beams that ran along one wall.

  The police began to look into the life of the solitary Brighton social worker, at this stage looking for men who might be connected to her. At the same time CCTV footage of central Brighton was being combed to try to find the last movements of Carly and Isla. The police had them walking past a security camera at 4.15 p.m. near the city centre; a week later one of the hundreds of cars that the police were processing from near that spot, a white Renault Clio, turned out to belong to Olivia Duvall. The police couldn’t examine her car, though, because she had sent it to be scrapped days before.

  They began a thorough search of her house, concentrating on the cellar, but found nothing. Behind a radiator in the hallway, however, they found a hairband with Molly’s hair in it.

  And then the team got the breakthrough – the scrapped Renault Clio had been sold on in parts. They traced the seats to a garage in Worthing, and deep down in the crack of the front passenger seat they found a sequin from Isla Bukowski’s bag.

  Olivia was arrested and the police went to work on her house, finding that household bleach had been used to clean almost every surface in the basement and the rest of the house, destroying fingerprints and DNA. On the second day the police began spraying Luminol and discovered that the wooden floor in the living room had once had a large arc of blood splattered across it. On the inside leg of an armchair in the same room they found a fingerprint that belonged to Heather. She must have been lying on the floor, reaching out for something to hold.

  In the basement they found three blue threads from Carly’s pants, caught on a nail. The police got an extension to keep Olivia detained for longer. The investigation was in a frenzy, public horror and disgust at fever pitch. Then they discovered that the blood on the floor matched Molly’s. And then they began testing the soil in the secluded garden, screened by tall firs, and found high levels of components from human blood and several human bone fragments. The bones had lain in the soil for at least two years, and were impossible to identify.